Ensanches in the Basque Country

The exhibition explores the origins of "ensanches" while analyzing and comparing, through historical documentation, publications and an audiovisual installation, the "ensanches" of Donostia-San Sebastián, Bilbao and Vitoria-Gasteiz

The last exhibition the Basque Architecture Institute will host at the Convento de Santa Teresa before its autumn move to Tabakalera can be visited until September 27
During July and September, guided tours with the curator, workshops for families, and the presentation of the book "Permanencias en la arquitectura urbana" by José Ignacio Linazasoro will be offered

Was any past layout better?  The question posed by urban planner Manuel de Solà-Morales sums up the aim of "Ensanches in the Basque Country," an exhibition presented today at the Basque Architecture Institute and open to visitors until September 27. It is the last exhibition the Basque Architecture Institute will host at the Convento de Santa Teresa before its autumn move to the third floor of Tabakalera.

The exhibition, curated by Luis Tena Núñez, highlights the "ensanches" — the urban expansion projects developed in European cities during the 19th and early 20th centuries to make use of land freed up by the demolition of city walls and to absorb a continuously growing population, giving these new areas a level of habitability and road connectivity that the historic city lacked. Today, "ensanche" also refers to the area of the city built as a result of that process.

In this sense, the 19th-century "ensanches" constitute one of the most important urban planning operations of the modern European city. In addition to responding to demographic and industrial growth, they established a way of understanding urban expansion based on planning, hygiene, mobility and regularity of layout.

For much of the 20th century, the critical corpus of the Modern Movement rejected 19th-century "ensanches," viewing them as an obsolete urban form associated with the bourgeois, industrial city. The closed block, street continuity and mixed use were replaced by the principles of functionalist urbanism, based on zoning, isolated blocks and the separation of functions.
Starting in the 1970s, as the exhibition notes, this view began to be critically reassessed. Authors such as Manuel de Solà-Morales championed the value of "ensanches" as flexible urban fabrics capable of adapting to new needs without losing their structure. Their reappraisal marked a paradigm shift: rather than replacing the existing city, the emphasis shifted to its rehabilitation and to recognizing the continued relevance of inherited urban form. The exhibition thus proposes a rereading of the "ensanche" as an urban model of extraordinary formal, spatial and functional richness, whose qualities remain a reference point for thinking about and designing housing and the contemporary city.

The presentation of the exhibition was attended by Denis Itxaso, Minister for Housing and Urban Agenda of the Basque Government; Luis Tena, curator of the exhibition; Anabel Varona and Carlos Arruti, heads of educational outreach at the Basque Architecture Institute; and José Ángel Medina, director of the Basque Architecture Institute.

Minister Denis Itxaso highlighted that the "ensanches" of the three Basque capitals represent "much more than an urban planning operation," since they embody "a way of understanding the city as a space for coexistence, equal opportunity and quality of life." In this regard, he stressed that the exhibition invites reflection on the origins of our cities and on "what we can learn today from that compact, connected, human-scaled urban model to address the challenges of the present."

During his remarks, Itxaso also argued that the lessons of the "ensanches" remain fully relevant to today's challenges around housing access and urban transformation. "Today we also have to tear down walls: the difficulties in accessing housing, social segregation, urban sprawl, or the need to adapt our cities to climate change," he stated. According to him, "we need more housing, but well integrated into living neighborhoods, with services, public transport and quality spaces. In short, we need to build and regenerate the city, not just produce square meters," he concluded.

Exhibition curator Luis Tena explained that "the exhibition approaches the 'ensanches' from four complementary dimensions: a first, theoretical and informative one, explaining their origin and their relationship with the European urban planning tradition; a second, analytical and descriptive one, focused on the Basque 'ensanches'; a third, documentary one, reconstructing the real historical process behind the original layout; and a fourth, of a perceptual and sensory nature, bringing together the artistic mediation work carried out by the Basque Architecture Institute's team together with secondary schools and three artists."

Regarding this last section of the exhibition, Carlos Arruti, head of educational outreach at the Basque Architecture Institute, detailed the process behind the three artistic mediation pieces created together with secondary school students from schools located within the "ensanches" featured in the exhibition, such as IES Ekialdea in Vitoria or IES Miguel de Unamuno in Bilbao. "Thanks to the collaboration of students from the participating schools, together with artists Susana Blasco, Nagore Legarreta and Tzesne we have been able to develop three pieces that highlight the way we currently view the 'ensanches,' offering a fragmented, deconstructed take on these originally highly ordered and regular environments." Thus, in contrast to the alignment of city blocks shown in the exhibition, these perspectives offer a reflection on the intangible aspects that surround us, highlighting urban emptiness, collective memory, and the echo of our feverish activity in cities that resonate like a sounding board with the flow of our lives.

From the Cerdà Plan to contemporary reappraisal 
The first section of the exhibition presents the "ensanche" as a planned urban response to the growth of European cities during the 19th century, taking the Cerdà Plan for Barcelona as its paradigm, through which the main features of this urban planning model are explained, along with its relationship to Greco-Roman, Renaissance and Enlightenment urbanism. This first space also traces the gradual reappraisal of this way of building cities, from the arrival of postmodernism in the 1970s to the present day, which led to protection and heritage-recovery processes for the "ensanches" and their architecture. Plans and various publications illustrate this part of the exhibition. It also highlights the 1974 San Sebastián Architecture Week, featuring the original poster for this landmark event, created by artist Andrés Nagel and organized by architects José Ignacio Linazasoro and Miguel de Garay through the culture committee of the Basque-Navarre Architects' Association, which marked a turning point in the appreciation of "ensanches." In this room, Linazasoro himself recounts this historical episode in a video.
Between art and school: the outlook of a new generation.

This presentation of the "ensanche" is followed by a section analyzing and comparing the "ensanches" of Donostia-San Sebastián, Bilbao and Vitoria-Gasteiz based on the level of development and definition reached in each of their layouts. For this purpose, an installation has been designed featuring three overhead projections onto the floor plans of the three "ensanches," printed on the floor at identical orientation and scale, successively overlaying the different proposal and construction plans of these neighborhoods, allowing visitors to compare their evolution and chronological development. The installation is completed with documentation covering the key features of each "ensanche," along with a detailed description of each.
The exhibition goes on to recall that the "ensanches," now a well-established and widely recognized part of the architectural and urban heritage, are not solely the product of the brilliant ideas of those who conceived the original plan. Rather, these areas are in fact the result of a long process of collective reflection and enrichment: successive modifications and adjustments that have enriched, refined and beautified the initial "ensanche" projects.

Finally, the exhibition closes with the results of the artistic mediation process led by Maushaus, in charge of educational outreach at the Basque Architecture Institute, in which three contemporary artists worked together with secondary school students from Vitoria-Gasteiz, Bilbao and Donostia-San Sebastián to reinterpret the "ensanches" of their respective cities. The result is three pieces — Arquitecturas enredadas, Ensantxe::Player and Collage — that invite reflection on urban emptiness, collective memory and the echo of our everyday activity in cities that resonate like a sounding board with the flow of our lives.

Guided tours, workshops and book presentation
 The exhibition is accompanied by a program of activities aimed at families as well as the general and specialized public. On July 21, the Basque Architecture Institute will host the presentation of the book "Permanencias y arquitectura urbana" by José Ignacio Linazasoro, who has just been awarded the Gold Medal for Architecture by the Higher Council of Spanish Architects' Associations. The book approaches the city as living memory: a fabric of inherited traces and marks in which designing does not mean starting from scratch but critically interpreting what already exists, so that history and contemporary intervention can enter into dialogue without cancelling each other out — an idea that runs throughout the exhibition.
Guided tours of the exhibition with curator Luis Tena have also been organized for July 25 and September 5, at 11:30 am and 12:30 pm, in Spanish and Basque.
Workshops for families will take place on September 4 and 11 at 5:30 pm, inviting visitors to reflect on the history and growth of the city under the title "Walk about."

About the curator 
Luis Tena Núñez is an architect from the Higher Technical School of Architecture (ETSA) of the University of Navarra, with 48 years of professional experience at the head of his own studio in Pamplona, as well as 44 years of teaching experience. His work combines architectural practice with a strong commitment to urban planning, a field in which he served as head of Urban Planning for the Pamplona City Council and taught subjects such as Introduction to Urban Planning, Urban Morphology, and City and Landscape. He has taught alongside figures such as Rafael Moneo and Juan Navarro Baldeweg, and has been a visiting professor at UNIS in Guatemala. He is the author of the audiovisual series "12 Ciudades," focused on the urban analysis of European and American capital cities, which was previously featured in the Basque Architecture Institute's Hiru Hiri exhibition program, and has received numerous awards, including the COAVN Urban Planning Award (1991) and a nomination for the Mies van der Rohe Award (1999).

About the Basque Architecture Institute The Basque Architecture Institute focuses on bringing architecture closer to citizens and fostering debate around architecture, urban planning, landscape and design. The center is driven by the Basque Government's Department of Housing and Urban Agenda, in collaboration with the Department of Culture, Cooperation, Youth and Sports of the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa.

Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday, 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm. Saturday, 11:00 am to 2:00 pm and 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm. Sunday, 11:00 am to 2:00 pm.
For more information: Ane Rotaeche Alquiza , contact@eai.eus, www.eai.eus